Agricultural tractors are used in combination with implements which are towed by the tractor. A tractor/baler combination is used in agriculture to take up crop lying or standing on a field and to press and bind it to a bale. A tractor/baler combination with automatically controlled operations is described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,404,355, issued in July 2008 and assigned to the assignee of the present application.
When a tractor is pulling a round baler through a field it is necessary to keep the tractor stationary while the bale is ejected and the gate or rear door is closed. Many times an operator will re-initiate motion before the gate is fully closed and latched. This can prevent the cycle from completing successfully. With a baler, material may get caught in the gate and prevent it from fully closing. This results in lost time while the gate is reopened, the debris is removed, and the gate is closed again. Also, if the bale ejection cycle is initiated before the bale is fully wrapped, the bale may unwrap after the ejection resulting in either loss of the material or loss of time to re-bale the material.
With an automated system, the machine can determine when it is appropriate to move on to the next step of the operation. For example, eject the bale and/or re-initiate motion once the bale has been ejected. The automated system thereby provides additional opportunities to ensure that the operation is completed successfully in the correct order. In the case of ejecting a bale prematurely, the automated system can initiate this only after the bale wrapping process has been completed. For the case of re-initiating motion before the bale ejection cycle is complete, it can prevent the tractor from moving even if the operator attempts to start motion. It is not always feasible for an automated system to fully encompass all of the many exceptions to the “normal” field operation/sequences. For these cases, it would be desirable to provide the operator a relatively simple way to override the mistake proofing features.